Prosecraft, an AI tool that compiled 27000 authors' books worldwide, is now facing backlash from their respective authors for non-consensual publishing.
For writers, not being a friend to Artificial Intelligence has become a natural tendency. AI is now creating stories, poems, songs, and whatnot, leading to an existential crisis among even the most celebrated authors across the world. Each emerging AI tool makes the importance of human-made art less important.
But one fine line that was recently crossed by this AI platform called Prosecraft was of compiling 27000 published books on its database without their respective author’s consent.
What did ProseCraft do?
Prosecraft is a website that came into existence in 2017. The owner of this website, Benji Smith, the owner of the website has now shut down the website after receiving grievances from multiple authors both personally and on social media.
What his platform did manually was recently upgraded to an AI-powered transformer that compiled the text of 27000 books, compared their internal text for quality, rated them, and analyzed them on the basis of liveliness, ranging from most passive to most vivid.
Some of the publishings were not even a month old.
Criticism Is Not The Main Problem
Even though the writers did not like the idea of an AI tool criticizing their work of art that took both hours of dedicated writing and included their own writing style, the main reason for this outrage was something else.
The writers revealed that while the tool showed comparisons of active and vivid texts, the text itself gave out multiple spoilers of the story. This could play a huge role in killing the interest of readers who would’ve bought the books if not for this non-consensual sharing of their content.
Was Smith’s Intent Harmful?
Benji Smith wrote an entire blog post explaining why he created the platform and what the role of AI in it actually was.
“I’ve spent thousands of hours working on this project, cleaning up and annotating text, organizing and tweaking things,” Smith wrote, “But now ‘AI’ has become a thing. And AI’s arrival on the scene was marred by early use cases that allowed anyone to effortlessly create impersonations of artists and shut those creators out of their own creative process.”
The development of Artificial Intelligence is both breaking boundaries of innovation and crossing boundaries of ethics at times as well. The need to regulate the development and usage of AI by businesses takes immediate priority before such unregulated platforms create bigger havoc among humans.
